MOVING IMAGE | In Praise of Chairs

Chairs. There are a lot of films that have chairs in them. Lots of different films too. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has chairs. Dumb & Dumber has chairs. The Great Dictator has chairs. The 400 Blows has chairs. It’s almost definitely weirder for a film to not have chairs than to have chairs. Imagine the Blue Pill scene in The Matrix without those epic red arm chairs that Morpheus and Neo sit in. Or the final duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker without the Emperor sitting in his iconic throne. Chairs.

You can relax, because there’s a video essay, from the wonderful video essayists Every Frame a Painting, dedicated to the presence of chairs in film. You can relax even more, because you don’t have to go anywhere to find it. It’s the YouTube clip that we’ve embedded above this text.

If you’re not already on the video essay train, this is an interesting albeit possibly unconventional place to start, but take it from us – video essays can offer some of the best insight in cinema going around, in a very easy-to-digest, enjoyable manner. There are whole bunch of top notch video essays in our Moving Image department.